YOU MAY BE SURPRISED TO HEAR THAT I’M A STAUNCH defender of a girl’s right to go wild. I just want to redefine the terms under which we can do it. I think if you want to wear a skimpy outfit because it makes you feel powerful or turned on, then you deserve a world in which you can do that without being harassed, shamed, or violated. If you want to make out with a stranger on a dance floor because it’s thrilling and feels a little dangerous and because, well, that stranger is hot? Please get your mack on. Ditto for flirting, being out alone after dark, drinking socially, and nearly everything else on the list of things girls are supposed to avoid doing lest we “get ourselves” raped. Because you can’t get yourself raped. No, really. You can’t. Get yourself. Raped.¹ You can only be raped. And if someone is raping you? Committing a violent felony assault against you? It’s their fault, not yours, regardless of what you were doing beforehand.

Now, let me take a moment to say that if you’re not a wild child by nature, by all means, stick to your nature. There’s nothing liberating about acting like a party girl in order to prove how free you are, when you’d rather be home in your jammies reading a book. What’s more, few of us want the same level of wildness at all times. As long as you’re doing what you enjoy, on your terms, and you’re not hurting yourself or others in the bargain, there’s no shame in wherever you fall on the snuggle-to-party spectrum.

So instead of adhering to a one-size-fits-none policy that discourages you from pursuing things you enjoy—whether it’s skinny-dipping with friends or having a hot fling—why not develop the tools to listen to your own needs and boundaries, separate real danger from manufactured fear, and learn how to determine and weigh risks involved in any given situation?

But first, let’s do a quick check-in: How’s it going with the daily writing and the weekly body love? Are you doing it every day, never, or some of the time? How is it feeling? You’re a quarter of the way through this book, and it’s about to get a little more personal, so now is a great time to recommit to these tools, which are key ways to support and affirm yourself as you go through this process.

Dive In: To get in the mood, why don’t you reread the list of body-loving activities you brainstormed in chapter 1, and then add a few more things to the list?

YOU’RE NUMBER ONE

The first and most important step in keeping yourself safe while pursuing a life full of pleasure is deciding that you are worth protecting. For many women, this is no small challenge. Critical to it is determining what your personal boundaries are and respecting them.

Boundaries—some people call them limits—are any point past which you’re personally unwilling to go, or any behavior you’re unwilling to put up with. You’re the only person who can decide what your boundaries are, whether it’s that you don’t have sex until after the fourth date or that you feel like a particular person is being rude to you and you don’t want to talk with them anymore. Your boundaries can change depending on who you’re with and what mood you’re in, and that’s fine. What’s important is that you learn what they are, and that they—and you—are worth sticking up for.

I tend to feel very selfish when I think about myself in any positive, want-to-take-care-of-myself kind of way. I have this feeling like “I don’t deserve this. I don’t do enough to deserve this.” I tend to disassociate from my body, so I don’t really know how to take care of my body, or know how to be good to my body, so I also tend to be like, Oh, well, if he doesn’t want to use a condom, I’m sure it will be fine, even though I know that’s really stupid. It just happens, and I regret it, and I beat myself up for it, but I think it does come down to thinking I’m not worth protecting or standing up for. I’m not worth questioning somebody else’s decision. Like, what if this makes them not want me? {Heidi}

I’ve never felt clearer than when I admitted to myself out loud that if I don’t care about myself, as a Black woman, nobody will. If I went missing, you wouldn’t hear about me on the news. So when people are messing with me, I’ve decided to take the stance that I can be right, and our culture can be wrong. It is wrong. I’m not out of my mind, and it is within our power to change it. {Gray}

Taking care of your own safety should be one of your primary responsibilities. When I feel deserving of my personal boundaries and capable of defending them, I feel safer and more secure in my life, which frees up so much energy to focus on other things. I use a lot of that energy to work for the safety of other women. You can do amazing things with that energy, too, for yourself and other people you care about.

Dive In: Think about situations in which you’ve treated your needs or boundaries as unimportant. List at least five instances. Now pick one, and imagine that instead of you being in that situation, it had been someone you care about. Write an imaginary letter to that person, expressing what you wish they could have done differently in that situation. Acknowledge with compassion why it may have been hard for them to speak up for their boundaries, and then explain why it’s so important to you that they overcome those obstacles and learn to believe and act like they’re worth defending.

GETTING REAL ABOUT RISK

The first thing to know about risk is that it can’t be avoided. There is no way to live your life completely and utterly safe from risk. Choosing to do nothing, ever, brings its own set of risks, including depression, vitamin D deficiency, muscle atrophy—you get the picture. And in terms of sexual safety, staying in your home certainly doesn’t guarantee that no one will ever sexually violate you, given that most rapists choose victims they already know. So it’s crucial to let go of the idea that there are choices you can make that will guarantee your safety. They just don’t exist.

What do exist are different types of risk (the emotional risk of isolation vs. the physical risk of assault), different levels of risk (are you risking being rejected by someone you just met or having your heart broken by someone you love?), and related pleasures or other rewards associated with pursuing them (bonding with friends, sexual satisfaction, emotional intimacy, adrenaline rushes, etc.).

When it comes to assessing the risks associated with self-expression and sexuality, it’s good to prepare in advance by separating myth from fact. Let’s start by reality-checking some of the most common “risks” women are warned about:

Being Out Alone After Dark

Myth: A stranger will jump out of the bushes and attack you!

Reality Check: Could it happen? Sure. But it’s pretty rare—around 80 percent of rape victims know their attackers, so, statistically speaking, you’re in greater danger from the male acquaintance who offers to walk you home. Besides, men are 150 times more likely to be attacked in public by a stranger than women are, so why is it that women are the ones taught to be afraid of being alone in public? Of course you should take precautions if you’re in a particularly dangerous area, but overall, this myth doesn’t make you safer—it detracts from the reality of how most attacks against women happen and makes women feel less free to live our lives.

Dive In: Call your local police department and ask them how many violent crimes have been committed in your area, what percentage of the victims have been women, and how many of those were victimized while walking alone by themselves. (Keep in mind that 60 percent of rapes are never reported to authorities, and most of the nonreported ones are committed by someone the victim knows.) Then find out how many people have been injured or killed in car accidents in the same area in the same time period.

Still don’t feel safe? Be sure to read the section on self-defense later in this chapter.

Going Out Drinking

Myth: It will get you assaulted! And it will make you slutty!

Reality Check: For lots of people, including women, social drinking is fun. Sometimes it helps us loosen up in social situations, sometimes we simply enjoy the taste of great beer or cocktails, and sometimes we just like feeling a little buzz among friends. There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as you’re not regularly getting so hammered you can’t think straight (in which case you may have a problem with alcohol).

However, it’s important to know that alcohol and drugs are also the preferred tool of rapists. According to self-admitted rapists, over 70 percent used alcohol or drugs to subdue their victims.² So if someone you’re with is pressuring you to drink or take drugs when you don’t want to, that’s a warning sign that you’re not in good company. Even if this person is not a rapist, the fact that they ignore your reluctance to drink or your desire to stop means they’re someone who doesn’t respect your boundaries. Pretty self-centered company at best, really dangerous company at worst. (It bears repeating that it’s still not your fault if you succumb to their pressure and then they assault you. No amount of alcohol or drugs can ever make getting raped your fault. But forewarned is forearmed.)

It’s also utter bunk to suggest that drinking will give you sexual desires that you don’t normally have when you’re sober. It may reduce any resistance you might have to act on your desires, but it won’t create desires in you that don’t already exist. Think about it: You’re probably not a thief. Does drinking make you more likely to steal? Not if you don’t already have that impulse.

On the other hand, if you are deliberately getting drunk in order to do things sexually that you wouldn’t do sober, that’s not healthy or safe. Using alcohol or drugs to numb your own desires or boundaries can also numb the part of you that insists on safer sex, and it definitely numbs your intuition about whether or not a person is safe to be sexual with. Beyond that, getting drunk to override your sober judgment is a way of violating your own boundaries. Every time you do it, you’re telling yourself: My boundaries don’t matter. You’re setting a dangerous precedent, because the next time someone ignores your boundaries, it will seem like less of a big deal, since you’ve done the same thing yourself.

Dive In: Not sure if you’re crossing the line from healthy social drinking to a more dangerous cocktail? Ask yourself these questions:

• Of the last (up to) five sexual encounters I’ve had, how many involved me being drunk?

• Of the last (up to) five times I’ve had drunk sex, how many involved me doing something I regretted afterward?

• When I think about having sex while sober, I feel

(I don’t need to score this quiz for you, do I?)

Wearing Sexy Clothes/Being Flirtatious

Myth: People will assume you’re “easy” or you “want it.”

Reality Check: If people make assumptions about you based on how you dress, whether or not you like to flirt, or if you get down on the dance floor and make out with someone in public, that’s their business. Just because you are expressing yourself sexually in public doesn’t mean anybody has the right to expect that you’ll take it further sexually with them or with anyone else who happens to be around. As stockbrokers say, “Past performance is not an indicator of future results.”

Beyond that, research shows that predators look for targets that seem vulnerable. When you hear people say, “Rape isn’t about sex; it’s about power,” that’s what they mean. You can’t “cause” someone to sexually abuse you by being too sexy. Sure, you may turn someone on enough that they’ll try to hit on you for sex, but if they’re not a rapist, they’re not going to simply lose control and assault you. Sexy vs. modest isn’t the distinction predators make. They’re much more concerned with whether you look strong vs. whether you look vulnerable, and you can project either of these regardless of what you’re wearing or who you’re flirting with.

Might some people (who aren’t dangerous) make assumptions about you if you’re wearing something they consider “provocative”? Yes, that’s a risk. As we discussed above, you weigh the risks with the rewards, and everyone’s threshold is different. And perhaps your goal is to have others find you provocative. And that’s okay, too. That doesn’t give anyone the right to mistreat you, and it doesn’t make you “easy.” It simply makes you you.

On the other hand, if you’re dressing or acting “sexy” because you think people will like you more, or for any reasons that have more to do with someone else’s expectations than with what feels right to you, that won’t get you any closer to what you really really want. In fact, the further you stray from your authentic self, the less likely you’ll be to attract the kinds of people into your life that you genuinely want to meet.

I would rather be inside with apple cider and a copy of War and Peace. That’s just the kind of person I am. When I look at pictures of myself from several years ago, when I was wearing the hair, and miniskirts, and stiletto heels, you know, it was like my uniform—that was the fake part. That was the inauthentic, here-I-am-performing-what-I-think-sexuality-is part. It just wasn’t natural to me. Which isn’t to say I’m not a sexual person. It just feels fake for me to do that. {Gray}

Also complicating the matter is the question of what, exactly, constitutes “sexy” behavior or dressing. Jessica Valenti, founder of Feministing.com, wound up in the center of a controversy when she wore a perfectly work-appropriate fitted sweater to a meeting with former president Bill Clinton, somehow inspiring a firestorm over how she used her breasts to draw attention to herself in the (incredibly tame) group photo taken at the event.³

On the other hand, some of us find that clothes that make us feel sexy fail to get read as such, even in settings where we really want them to: “Feeling sexy when you’re buttoned up to the middle of your neck is really hard,” says Enoch. “When I go to parties, I want to show more skin, but I also want to say, Hey, look, I’m also trans. We are told that the only way to feel sexy, as people with female-assigned bodies, is to show as much of that body as possible. It takes a lot of work to get out of that.”

So have some fun. Play with your look and your behavior in ways that make you feel good, but try to let go of worrying “what people will think.” Because you don’t have any control over that anyhow.

Dive In: Declare Opposite Day. The idea here is to try something new in order to discover how well your current approach is working for you, or if another one might feel more true to yourself. There’s no right answer—just notice whatever you learn.

If you usually dress in clothes that make you feel sexy (whatever those clothes look like to you—what matters is how they make you feel) when you go out socially, put on an outfit that mutes your sexuality the next time you go out. But if you usually are more low-key, put on an outfit that makes you feel sexy and go somewhere in it, projecting confidence. Either way, pay attention to how you feel as people respond to you. Do you feel more or less like yourself than you usually do?

Or put on your “Opposite Day” outfit and go somewhere in it acting as though you feel confident, even if you don’t. Sometimes you fake it until you make it. And sometimes you discover you’re not faking it as much as you thought you were. Notice how you feel as people respond to you. Does the outfit become more comfortable as you wear it, or less so?

Or put on your “Opposite Day” outfit and wear it around your house in private. Then, with the outfit still on, sit down and imagine wearing it somewhere public with confidence. Write about what it would feel like, and how you imagine people would respond to you.

Ultimately, what’s important is knowing how to separate the real risks from the hype. And to learn how to evaluate your risk tolerance, which is unique to you. There’s no mathematical formula to determine your limits, but there are three simple questions you can ask yourself that always apply:

• How bad will it be if this situation doesn’t turn out well? For example, if you’ve always wanted to try out a sex toy with your partner, and the worst-case outcome is rejection or social awkwardness, you may be more willing to do it, but if your partner wants to have unprotected sex, that can put you at risk of STDs (and possibly pregnancy), so you may be less willing to do it.

• How good will it be if it goes my way? Often when evaluating risk, we get caught up in the worst-case scenario. But it’s important to also weigh the potential benefits if the risk pays off. Take relationships, for example. If there wasn’t something worthwhile at stake—like pleasure, love, adventure, or intimacy—we wouldn’t be tempted to take the risk in the first place. If the potential payoff means more to you, you may find you’re more willing to take larger risks.

• How likely is it that something bad or good will happen if I do this “risky” thing? Using the information out there, as well as your own experience and the experiences of others you trust, make an assessment of how likely the outcomes are that you both fear and desire. Are there ways to pursue the rewards you’re after without exposing yourself to these risks? Be sure to factor in things you can do to reduce risk, like always practicing safer sex or letting someone know where you’re going and when to expect you’ll return.

Dive In: List five sexual things that seem both risky to do and appealing to you. They can be things you’ve done before or things you’ve never tried—anything from going out in a hot skimpy outfit to asking a partner to tie you up to hooking up with a stranger. Now circle the one that’s most appealing to you, and also circle the one that seems the riskiest (these may be different items on your list, or the same one). For each circled activity, ask yourself the three questions on the preceding page and write out your answers. List all the bad things that could happen if you do this thing (risks can be physical, emotional, financial, etc., and affect both you and other people); then assess how likely it is for those bad things to happen and think of anything you can do to reduce those risks. Then list all the potential good outcomes and assess how likely it is for them to happen. You don’t need to make a decision about whether or not it’s worth doing—just notice your feelings as you complete the exercise.

LISTEN TO YOUR INTUITION

A lot of times, we have to evaluate risks on the fly. That’s when we have to rely on intuition.

We all have intuition. It’s that funny feeling you get in your gut about something or someone when you don’t really know why you have that feeling and yet there it is. Like when you know who’s calling before you look at your caller ID. Maybe that feeling is saying, Run away. Maybe it says, Go for it. Maybe it says, Proceed with caution. Those are all messages your intuition can send you.

As women, we’re taught to ignore our intuition. We’re told it’s a sign of weakness. But nothing could be further from the truth.

I used to be a very intuitive person. I used to wear my emotions on my sleeve at all times. I just had a sense about things. But I got made fun of for being a crybaby or being too “out there,” and so I began just keeping stuff inside, and that was around the time when my sense of noticing danger got warped. {Mag}

You may be wondering how the Terrible Trio fits in here. Fear, especially, can feel like intuition—and sometimes it is. Other times, it’s been ingrained in us and is holding us back while masquerading as intuition. The best way to tell the difference between a helpful intuitive fear and a fake one that’s holding you back is to practice. The more you practice listening to your intuition, the sharper it will become. The exercise at the end of this section will help you do that.

It’s also worth checking out Gavin de Becker’s book The Gift of Fear, which is a great source of information and inspiration on how to sharpen your intuition. De Becker—an expert security consultant—believes that our experience of intuition happens when our brain knows something and wants us to act so fast that it doesn’t have time to explain to us why we know what we know. Here’s what he has to say about it:

What [we] want to dismiss as a coincidence or gut feeling is in fact a cognitive process, faster than we recognize and far different from the familiar step-by-step thinking we rely on so willingly . . . Nature’s greatest accomplishment, the human brain, is never more efficient or invested than when its host is at risk. Then, intuition is catapulted to another level entirely . . . Intuition is the journey from A to Z without stopping at any other letter along the way. It is knowing without knowing why.

Unlike generalized fear, which has only the loosest relationship with reality, useful fear is always specific. It says, This particular person is lying to me. Don’t go into that particular place right now. Let’s get out of here. Generalized fear can actually be dangerous, because it can be like the background noise at a loud restaurant, which keeps you from being able to hear the conversation you actually want to focus on. When you’re afraid all the time, it’s hard to hear a specific fear instinct, because the other fear buzzing inside you drowns it out. It may cause you to avoid ever learning enough about the situations you fear to develop the keen intuition that will help you navigate them safely.

Think about it this way: You know that sometimes people get into car crashes. If that knowledge developed into a fear of ever getting into a car, that wouldn’t be intuition—it would be an overgeneralized fear that was holding you back from living your life. It would also make it harder to develop the real automotive intuition you need to keep yourself safe. Instead, if you learned more about the circumstances that made car crashes more or less likely and started by taking short, safer rides, working your way up to longer rides on faster roads at night, you would have the chance to develop your intuition about when a specific car was about to behave in a strange or dangerous way. And when you felt that intuition—a funny feeling that a car was about to swerve into your lane, though you couldn’t say why—you’d be much safer if you listened and responded to it.

That said, your intuition can also be wrong, if it’s based on inaccurate information. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t listen to it in the moment. But it’s useful to think about what triggered your intuition, after the fact. Did that man seem scary to you because he was wearing a heavy jacket in hot weather, and therefore might have been concealing a weapon? Or was he acting perfectly normal, but he was a man of color, and you’ve absorbed the false stereotype that men of color are more likely to be dangerous than white men? Checking the assumptions that underpin your intuition (after the fact, when you have time to think clearly) is an important way to make it more accurate, and to refuse to play into dangerous myths at the same time.

Dive In: Keep an intuition journal. This week, pay special attention to what your gut is telling you in different situations. They don’t even have to be safety related. Maybe you’ll have a twinge of a feeling that someone at your workplace is hiding something. Maybe you’ll “just know” that your roommate or partner is lying to you when they say they already called the landlord as promised. Maybe you’ll look at a car and know in advance that it’s going to run a red light. Whatever your intuition tells you, make a note of it, and then note what you did in response to your intuition. Did you follow your gut, resist it, hesitate? When it’s possible to know, note whether or not your intuition proved correct.

As you go, pick one or two intuitions and go a little deeper: In retrospect, why do you think you had that intuition? Can you identify the clues that you obviously knew but couldn’t articulate to yourself at the time? Were they based on real information?

HOW TO SAY NO

Every time you listen to what feels like your intuition, you get better at separating the real instincts from the impostors. You build that muscle. And ignoring your intuition does the opposite thing. It’s like a self-inflicted emotional injury. Make a habit of it, and it will leave your psychic immune system hobbled. And that leaves you vulnerable to manipulation, coercion, the Terrible Trio, and worse. Because when you regularly violate your own boundaries, it starts to seem like not such a big deal when someone else violates your boundaries. That’s a downward spiral that leads to nothing good.

So let’s get specific about how to take our intuition seriously. I know it can seem daunting to speak up for what you want and don’t want, because many of us aren’t in the practice of saying these sorts of things out loud. We’ve been taught that nice girls just don’t. But expressing our needs doesn’t have to be scary or hard—in fact, with some practice, it can be downright rewarding.

Let’s start by talking about boundary setting, because one of the best ways to free yourself to say yes to what you want is to feel secure in your ability to say no to what you don’t.

Say you’re at a party. You’re on the dance floor, getting your groove on, when a guy dances up to you. He’s a friend of a friend—you were introduced to him briefly earlier that night. He starts trying to grind with you. It’s nothing other couples aren’t doing around you, but still you feel uncomfortable. Quick—what would you do?

If you’re like most women, you answered with some variation on “nothing.” It’s no mystery why: As women, we’re taught from a young age to put other people’s comfort ahead of our own. So in situations like this, we wind up thinking, So he’s dancing too close. It’s not like he’s hurting me or even saying anything weird. Besides, my friend knows him, so how bad can he be? It’s not worth making a scene over.

There are three dangerous assumptions in this line of reasoning:

1. Any friend of my friend is a friend of mine. Wouldn’t it be great if this were true? Unfortunately, there are just too many variables here. How well do you know your friend? How well does your friend know this person? How much do you trust your friend’s judgment about people? Always use your own judgment, not someone else’s.

2. My feelings are irrational and/or unimportant. Along with learning to always put other people’s comfort before our own, we’re also taught that we’re “irrational” and “overly emotional” and we need to keep our feelings in check. But if your gut is telling you something’s not cool, and you try to silence that feeling because you’re afraid people will think you’re overreacting, you’re shutting down the best first-response security system you’ve got. As de Becker writes in The Gift of Fear, “To override that most natural and central instinct, a person must come to believe that he or she is not worth protecting.”

3. Setting a boundary = making a scene. It sure seems like this one is true, but if you’re straightforward and respectful, it doesn’t have to be. What’s more, if someone causes a scene in response to your expressing a personal boundary, that’s their fault, not yours, and it tells you something very important about their character.

Which brings us to the very simple yet powerful Nice Person Test. Here’s how it works:

Imagine the roles are reversed. You’re dancing with someone you just met at a party. Unbeknownst to you, you’re getting too close and making that person kind of uncomfortable. Would you want them to tell you?

Of course you would, because you’re a nice person. You don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable—in fact, you probably would make some effort to put most people at ease. And you know what? Most other people are like that, too. So expressing your boundary in this situation is actually paying someone a compliment—it’s treating that person as though you assume they are a nice, caring individual who wants you to be at ease. And if they behave otherwise, well, that tells you something crucial about that person, doesn’t it?

Of course, how you express your boundary here is going to make some difference in how it’s received, too. Here are two wrong ways to do it, and a right one:

• WRONG: Signs and Wonders. You don’t want to come off as too aggressive, so you just take a step back to put some space between you, maybe excuse yourself to go to the bathroom and hope he’ll be gone when you get back. It’s a dangerous game—if this guy is bad news, he may be looking for signs that you’re the “good” kind of victim who won’t speak up for herself. You probably don’t like to fail at much in life, but please, fail to be a good victim.

• WRONG: Preemptive Strike. You’re so sure he’s going to think you’re a humorless bitch for wanting some personal space that you don’t give him a chance to think otherwise, shouting at him something like, “You need to fucking step back, asshole.” He certainly won’t mistake you for an easy mark, but even if he is a nice guy, he may feel defensive and want to save face in front of his friends if he’s suddenly getting reamed out by some girl about something he may not have even known he was doing. And then you will be causing a scene, which isn’t fun for anyone and is going to make you more reluctant to express your boundaries in the future.

• RIGHT: Nice and Direct. The basic assumption of the Nice Person Test applies to how you express yourself, too. If you were in his shoes, what would you want to hear? How about a friendly but firm request like “Hey, we can keep dancing, but you’re closer than I’m comfortable with. Can we make a little space?” Then smile warmly, continue dancing, and pay attention to what happens next.

Does he apologize and comply? Congratulations! You may well be dealing with a Nice Person.

Does he curse you out and walk away? Good riddance. Does he refuse to move, ignoring your request, mocking you for it or flatly declining it? Even getting more aggressively intimate than he was before? This is unlikely to happen, but if it does, it’s an explicit threat. He is most definitely Not a Nice Person. Walk away from him (but don’t turn your back on him entirely), flag down a friend or even a sympathetic-looking stranger, and together go safely to a different location that doesn’t have him in it. If he follows you, or otherwise tries to prevent you from leaving, by all means, please make a scene. Directly and loudly tell individual bystanders what’s going on (“This guy is following me and won’t leave me alone!”), and if that doesn’t shame him into backing off, ask someone to call 911. Would you rather be The Girl Who Overreacted at That Party That Time or risk being assaulted? I thought so.

Whatever happens, you’ll have accomplished two important things:

1. You’ll have learned crucial information about whether or not your new friend is a decent human being who respects your boundaries, and

2. You’ll have prioritized your own intuition over your fear of offending or making a stir. That’s an important part of overcoming some of the most toxic Girl Programming our culture dishes out. Prioritizing yourself is like working a muscle: Every time you do it, you’ll make the next time easier and you’ll feel more strongly that it’s the right thing to do.

Dive In: Get out your notebook and spend ten minutes writing about a time you felt uncomfortable with someone’s behavior toward you but didn’t do anything about it. What were they doing and how did it make you feel? Why didn’t you do or say anything? How did you feel about that person afterward? How did you feel about yourself afterward?

Now, spend ten minutes writing about the same situation, and imagine you applied the Nice Person Test and acted on it. What would you have done or said differently? How do you think the person might have reacted? How do you think you’d have felt about them afterward? How would you have felt about yourself afterward?

SELF-DEFENSE

Even the topic of self-defense can make people anxious. I know this because I taught it for years. So before we get into it, take a deep breath. Go ahead: in . . . out . . . Do it a few times if you need to.

The main reason women in particular feel anxious about self-defense is that it forces us to confront our vulnerability. I’ve heard from so many women and girls over the years who’ve said they were uncertain about taking the class because they were worried it would make them more afraid. They knew that they’d have to think about the scary possibility of someone committing violence against them, or that they’d have to remember violence they’d already suffered. They much preferred to just not think about it.

I have a lot of empathy for women who feel that way, and surely I never want to push someone into doing something they’re not ready for. But I can tell you straight up that the role fear plays in my life is so much smaller now than before I learned to fight back. In other words, if you’re trying to reduce the amount of energy you give to fear, the only way out is through it.

What do I mean by this? I’ll tell you my story, and then we’ll talk big picture.

I was sexually assaulted during my junior year of college. It was such an average portrait of how sexual assault happens, it’s hardly worth describing—it was someone I knew; alcohol was involved; everyone wanted to know why I was making such a big deal out of it. But for me, it was a big deal. It was a rip in the fabric of my life—I suddenly understood that I wasn’t safe in my own body. My body could be controlled by someone else just because he felt like it. It was . . . indescribable, honestly. It plunged me into a period of fear. I didn’t want to hear any songs sung by men. If I was getting into an elevator on campus and there was an athletic-looking guy already on the elevator (the guy who attacked me was an athlete), I got off. I was afraid in public all the time, and it was exhausting. Not only had my security in my body been taken, but the amount of energy my fear now occupied was the ultimate insult added to my injury.

So when a friend of mine took a self-defense class that was then called Model Mugging (it’s now called IMPACT in most places) and showed me the video of her “graduation,” in which she took on gigantic padded assailants and fought them off with the power of a very focused tornado, I was transfixed. A month later, I was sitting in my sweatpants on a gym mat in a nondescript room, waiting for the first session to begin.

To say I knew nothing about self-defense would be an understatement. The sad reality was that the guy who attacked me was smaller than me. I now know that it would have taken very little to get him off me, to prevent all the trauma that I’ve suffered since. But I didn’t know that then. All I’d ever heard growing up was the opposite message: If a guy is trying to rape you, there’s really nothing you can do. Don’t fight back, or you’ll just make him angrier.

Now, this advice is completely, utterly bunk. Actually, it’s worse than bunk—it’s actively harmful. It’s the opposite of what’s true, and it puts women who follow it in much graver danger than they’d be in otherwise. In fact, researchers have discovered that women who fought back against would-be rapists not only were less likely to be raped, but, even if they were raped, had no more physical injuries than women who didn’t try to defend themselves.⁴

But I knew none of that at the time. Not until the third class of IMPACT, the class in which we tackled what they call “reversals.” They call sexual assault scenarios “reversals” because the strategy they recommend is all about reversing the script the assailant has in his head, and reversing the power dynamic of the situation.

Until that class, I’d been loving self-defense. Before IMPACT, everyone in my life had always told me to shush. I’m a loud girl by nature, so that’s hardly a surprise, but damn if it didn’t feel transformative for the IMPACT instructor to tell me to use my powerful volume on my own behalf. I’d also never hit another human being. (Well, maybe my sister when I was little, but I was never really trying to hurt her.) I’d certainly never hit another human being with my full force. I had no idea how hard I could hit! It felt amazing. I had never felt more powerful.

That all changed the moment I lay down on the mat and let the male instructor in his suit of padding, playing a potential rapist, climb on top of me. In that moment, the fire IMPACT had lit in my belly went out. I just couldn’t put my heart into fighting him off. I went through the motions, yes, I even fought hard enough to “win,” but it wasn’t a win I could feel inside.

It took me a long while to figure out what the problem was. After all, I was ferocious when fighting in stranger-on-the-street scenarios, and I had so much more motivation to fight hard when it came to rape. What I eventually realized was this: I was afraid that if I knew now how to have prevented what happened to me then, I would no longer have the right to all of my feelings about what he did to me. It wasn’t rational, of course, but trauma rarely is. It took me years to really find the fight in those reversals.

The other objection some women have to self-defense is that it puts the responsibility on women to protect themselves, instead of obligating rapists to not rape women in the first place. I’m pretty sensitive to this argument, having edited an entire book about how to stop making women responsible for rape prevention and to put the focus where it belongs: on the rapist. But advocating self-defense for women isn’t about blaming current or future victims. It’s about dealing with reality as it exists today.

The truth is, violence against women isn’t going to end tomorrow. Realistically speaking, it’s going to take decades (if not centuries) to undo all of the ways our culture encourages and allows rape. In the meantime, all the women living in the world are still, well, living. In the world. The current world, in which rape is shockingly common. Teaching women some tools we can use in case of emergency will help us deal with the world as it is while we’re working to make it better.

Imagine we each have a toolbox in which we can store tools for keeping ourselves safe. In it, we’ve got condoms and dental dams, maybe, and good communication skills, self-awareness, safecalls (more on those calls in chapter 8)—you get the picture. Well, why not have some more tools in there as well? Doesn’t having more tools make it more likely you’ll have the one you need in an emergency?

Does that mean I’m never afraid for my safety? Of course not. But it happens a lot less often since I trained in self-defense, for a few simple reasons:

• I have much more information about how to assess any given situation and make an informed decision about how safe it is.

• If I feel afraid, I think about the worst thing that I’m afraid might happen, and then I calmly think through what my response would be. Knowing I can handle a worst-case scenario helps me let go of the fear and get on with my life.

Of course, self-defense isn’t a silver bullet, and it won’t make you invincible. There will always be the possibility that something will happen that you can’t have been prepared to handle. But that likelihood will be much, much smaller if you get training. By the same token, however much training you have, you’re under no greater obligation to fight back against an attacker than if you had no training. The act of rape is still their fault, never yours.

Dive In: During the next week, pay close attention to whether or not people’s behavior is making you uncomfortable. Did your roommate borrow your sweater without asking? Did a coworker say something inappropriate? Is someone bumping into you unnecessarily on the train? Whatever the situation, ask them to stop their behavior using the Nice Person Test: Think about what you’d want to hear if you were in their shoes, and then say that. Notice your feelings before, during, and after you take action. Did you feel fear? Did you feel embarrassed? Did you feel relief? Did you feel excited or powerful? There’s no right answer—it’s just useful to notice how you feel when you start sticking up for your boundaries, so you can watch those feelings change over time as you get more and more practice.

Go Deeper: For some of you, this chapter may have stirred up uncomfortable memories. Most of us have experienced sexual behaviors that were unwanted, unpleasant, threatening, or downright abusive. You’re probably thinking about some of those memories right now.

If it feels okay for you to write about one of these situations, you might find the advice below a helpful way to start. Choose any of them you like, and feel free to ignore the rest!

1. In your timeline, write a few incidents this chapter has reminded you of. Simply acknowledging your history can be a powerful act. You can always write more about any or all of them later if you want to.

2. Tell a friend or someone close to you that you are doing this work, so you don’t feel you are alone. You can ask the friend to check how you’re doing, or not. You can show them what you’ve written, or not.

3. Write in a café or somewhere else that has people in it. This can give you some human contact without its being intrusive.

4. Don’t judge or edit your work. Just get it down, any which way. Keep the pen or keys moving. Don’t go back and edit yourself.

5. Write in the mornings so that you don’t go to bed with those bad memories.

6. Sneak up on it! Write around the edges. Write the landscape or the characters. Write other stories set around the same time. As you work in the “general area,” you will become anesthetized to some extent.

7. Sometimes it helps to set a distance between you and the memories. Fictionalize. Change the point of view by writing about yourself as “she” or “you,” rather than “I.” Make it into a fairytale or a myth. Tell it from another angle—a tree, or an animal.

8. Write like a video recorder. Another way to get distance is to be coldly objective. Just write what happened, and don’t even bother to say how you felt.

9. You can write and never share. You can keep the work absolutely private. You don’t even have to read it yourself. Keep a secret journal or computer file only for that writing.

10. You can rewrite history. Write dialogues that address the conflicts, that tell people how angry or sad they made you feel. Take sections of painful events and reshape them. Write better endings.

11. Remember positive influences. Focus on things that helped you survive, people who made a difference.

12. Build in a reward for when you’re done—from ice cream to a walk with the dog.